Physicists Discover an Atomic Oddity

Sam Tabor, a professor of experimental nuclear physics at FSU and director of the university's Superconducting Accelerator Laboratory, recently performed the experiment at the GSI laboratory in Darmstadt, Germany, in collaboration with the international team. In the experiment, a cigar-shaped atom was created using a particle collider. To the scientists' surprise, this atom demonstrated a novel kind of radioactive decay by spitting out two free protons at the same time.

At the GSI lab, Tabor and his colleagues bombarded a thin film of nickel foil with a beam of calcium atoms, causing some nickel and calcium ions to coalesce to form silver atoms with fewer neutrons than normal. Most of these silver atoms decayed conventionally, but a few ejected two protons at once.

The deficit of neutrons in the silver had deformed the nuclei from spheres into fat cigar shapes. In some cases the proton pairs jumped out from the same end of the cigar, at other times from opposite ends, but they were always perfectly synchronized, Tabor said.

The collaborators now are discussing future directions for their research. "However," Tabor said, "we are also performing related research at the Superconducting Accelerator Laboratory right here at FSU.